[a basketball hoop somewhere in Washington, D.C. - K. Weidie]

Excuse the comparison to the men’s game and think of the following more as context to what the Washington Mystics have accomplished this season. Through their run, a prevailing storyline has been about someone who hasn’t played at all, all-star Alana Beard. No one expected Washington to do anything after Beard had season-ending surgery on an injured left ankle tendon in April. Instead, the Mystics finished as the first overall seed in the East.

Unfortunately for the growing Mystics fan base, their team lost its opening playoff game against the Atlanta Dream in D.C. on Wednesday night. They’ve long moved past the ‘what if we had Alana’ stage, but for context, perspective, and for the hell of it, let’s find the NBA equivalent of Beard’s statistical production for a better idea of her impact, or lack thereof.

I chose three advanced stat categories to put in the Basketball-Reference.com historical NBA database (and please excuse the refresher course via the Basketball-Reference glossary):

  • PER (Player Efficiency Rating): “The PER sums up all a player’s positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player’s performance.” *Note: developed by ESPN’s John Hollinger.
  • Usg% (Usage Percentage): “Usage percentage is an estimate of the percentage of team plays used by a player while he was on the floor.”
  • WS/48 (Win Shares Per 48 Minutes): “An estimate of the number of wins contributed by the player per 48 minutes (league average is approximately 0.100).”

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